Expanding the Boundaries of the Geospatial Standards World

By
Sam Bacharach

Many different industries and professions revolve
around buildings and physical infrastructure. Not only city planners,
civil engineers, architects and builders, but also realtors,
appraisers, tax officers, transportation officials, public safety
officials, mortgage companies and others create and use information
about the built environment. Like other industries and professions,
they create and share digital data to reduce costs, improve workflows,
and make new things possible.

But sharing data about the built environment is not easy. CAD-GIS
integration is necessary but not sufficient. Building Information
Models (BIM) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) "carry the semantic
payloads" that enable the base data to have richer descriptions of the
physical reality. Web services, 3D visualization and issues like
digital rights management and security are also part of the complex
standards picture.

The daunting task of creating harmonized, consensus-derived and open
information technology standards that serve all infrastructure-related
industries is moving forward because much is at stake. In the building
and physical infrastructure industry, the same kinds of progress that
help businesses implement communication and e-business solutions also
save lives in disasters and enable more sustainable communities.

The OGC Technical Committees CAD-GIS Working Group is becoming an
important focus for the convergence of the necessary standards. One
reason is that major CAD and GIS software vendors like Autodesk,
Bentley, Intergraph and ESRI are already at the table in the OGCs
consensus process. So are U.S. federal agencies, with much at stake in
this standards convergence, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the
General Services Administration, the Federal Geographic Data Committee,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Department of
Homeland Security. Several European governments have also shown
interest in the work. After a year of organizing, the Working Group is
gaining momentum and is being led by Tim Case of Parsons Brinckerhoff,
a global infrastructure services firm.

To support this work, the OGC has formed alliance partnerships through
formal agreements with the International Alliance for Interoperability
(IAI), the U.S. National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), and the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
(OASIS). OGC staff and members communicate with many other
organizations that have a stake in the outcomes. Some of these are the
Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA), Mortgage
Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO), and the Machinery
Information Maintenance Open Standards Association (MIMOSA). The US
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is becoming
central to this discussion because, through its Manufacturing
Engineering Laboratory (MEL), it has been working on AEC BIM issues for
years, and is now working in the OGCs OWS-4 testbed to help advance
standards convergence.

Obviously, it is the participants and not the silent stakeholders who
determine priorities. The door is open in the OGC for members to
organize around their particular interests within the broad and
seemingly unwieldy CAD-GIS space. Together with OGC Alliance partners
as noted above, they agree on a roadmap and work together to devise use
cases that address the overlap in their interests.

Not everything can be done at once. The OGC CAD-GIS Working Group is
specifically focusing at this time on facility planning, emergency
management, asset management and navigation. Specific data and services
interoperability may be achieved with CityGML, complex geometric
representations, Web Terrain Service and Web 3D Services specification
activities.

The fourth OGC Web Services initiative (OWS-4), a major
rapid-prototyping testbed, is also underway and includes a CAD-GIS-BIM
integration thread. Paul Cote at the Harvard Graduate School of Design
is the thread architect for a diverse group of leading vendors and
other members from the U.S. and Europe. OWS-4 is likely to make
important progress this year by integrating large and small scale
infrastructure models within a distributed client-server environment.

This kind of formal and open collaboration will achieve the
cross-industry communication that is necessary with the built
environment. We saw record attendance and very full agendas in
Edinburgh at the June OGC Technical and Planning Committee meetings.
The OGC's membership is growing, as participants at all levels and
domains recognize the value of participating in a well-managed
standards process and the value of connecting with OGC standards. The
OGC's core standards need to be made even more robust and flexible and
their various derivative forms - profiles and application schemas -
need to enter common discourse in the application domains where
geospatial is necessary but not the main concern.

A few years ago, the OGC changed its name to make people think in terms
of "geospatial" instead of "GIS," because "GIS" is only one of many
geospatial technologies. We broadened our scope and our thinking to
remove barriers that were preventing the full range of geospatial
capabilities from being used in the larger information technology
world. This move brought the work of OGC into contact with other
standards efforts. The strands of the great twenty-first century
interoperability cable are spinning together in ways that are hard to
predict. Global industries are recognizing their need for standards,
and global standards organizations are recognizing their need for close
coordination, because different industries do not exist in isolation
from each other, and neither do different digital technologies.